Thursday, September 22, 2011

Zhu Kezhen's Diary

'Shanghai Mayor Chen Yi spoke for one hour, explaining the importance of theory to the Communist revolution. He said that the Communists were humble and willing to listen to advice, that criticism should be penetrating, and that the essence of democracy was both that the minority followed the decision by the majority and that the majority should respect the opinions of the minority.

What he said was very reasonable.

Next Feng Ding from the Party Department of Propaganda spoke of Marxism and Leninism as the highest principles of all the theories in the world. He said that subjective opinions of the proletariat were more objective than the objective opinions of the bourgeois.

What he said was really hard to understand.'


Zhu Kezhen
竺可桢日记
9 June 1949

(Edited slightly from an article by Zuoyue Wang, translated by him, on Saving China through Science)